Since the dawn of the computer age, computers have evolved and become more and more powerful. In our present day, computers have become indispensable in many fields of human endeavor including engineering design, machine and process control, information storage and retrieval, and office computing. One of the primary uses of computers is for information storage and retrieval.
Database systems have been developed that allow a computer to store a large amount of information in a way that allows a user to search for and retrieve specific information in the database. For example, an insurance company may have a database that includes all of its policy holders and their current account information, including payment history, premium amount, policy number, policy type, exclusions to coverage, etc. A database system allows the insurance company to retrieve the account information for a single policy holder among the thousands and perhaps millions of policy holders in its database.
Retrieval of information from a database is typically done using queries. A query usually specifies conditions that apply to one or more columns of the database, and may specify relatively complex logical operations on multiple columns. The database is searched for records that satisfy the query, and the records are returned as query result.
Graphical querying interfaces have been developed that help a user to query a database by dynamically specifying search conditions. In this way, the user need not rely only upon a standard set of queries provided by an application. In addition, dynamically specifying search conditions enables the user to dynamically build queries based upon the most appropriate search conditions that may return the desired data. Due to the dynamic nature of the search conditions, the results that are returned as a result of a search need to be distributed and stored over multiple nodes of a business object. Frequently, a 1:n relation exists between records of multiple nodes and there is a need to display the records having 1:n relation in a single table to enable efficient data analysis. The existing graphical querying interfaces are unable to display records with 1:n relation in a single table. Displaying the records over multiple tables makes the data analysis a time consuming and tedious process.